Rye man is voice of Red Sox

Wednesday

Apr 30, 2008 at 2:00 AM

RYE — You don't have to tell Dave O'Brien he's lucky.

Adam Leech

RYE — You don't have to tell Dave O'Brien he's lucky.

The Rye resident grew up in Quincy, Mass., watching Carl Yastrzemski play in the shadows of the Green Monster from various seats at Fenway Park. Three decades later, he watches the game from the radio broadcast booth and conveys what he sees to millions of radio listeners throughout Red Sox Nation.

"I'd like to say I worked really hard and I had great teachers; those things are true," said O'Brien, 44, who moved to Rye with his family two years ago. "But a lot of it is luck."

O'Brien got his break in 1990, at the age of 25, when he was doing play-by-play for the University of Georgia men's basketball team. The radio station he worked for was also the flagship station for the Atlanta Braves, which happened to have a job opening for a play-by-play announcer. He was hired to his first Major League Baseball gig, which included working with greats such as Skip Caray, Pete Van Wieren and Don Sutton.

The Braves went from very bad to very good very quickly, winning the National League pennant in 1991, which gave O'Brien exposure. He caught the ear of a new team, the Florida Marlins, and was hired in 1992 as its play-by-play man. There, he celebrated a World Series championship in 1997 and watched the franchise's subsequent demise in the early part of the new millennium. That's when ESPN called.

"That was a dream job for me," said O'Brien. "I had always wanted to work for ESPN."

For the past six years, O'Brien has worked for "the worldwide leader in sports" doing baseball, college basketball and soccer. Currently, he can be heard and seen on ESPN's Wednesday night baseball from various parks throughout the country.

O'Brien's deep, booming voice is most often heard complementing longtime Boston broadcaster and Sox history czar Joe Castiglione on WRKO in Boston and stations throughout New England. It's the job he wanted since he was 12.

But O'Brien and his wife, Debbie, also a New England native, decided to move home long before the Sox job was available. They had lived with their three children — Michael, now 18, Samantha, 15, and Kaitlyn, 13 — in West Palm Beach, Fla., for 10 years, but knew they wanted to move closer to home once Michael graduated high school.

On a cool November day in 2006, after looking at roughly 50 houses in the greater Boston area, they found a keeper on South Road in Rye. They felt it was in the perfect school system, it gave them the changing seasons and brought them closer to the New England grittiness, attitude and work ethic they wanted to instill in their children.

That's when another dream came knocking. As they were driving away from the property, certain they would place an offer, a sports talk radio host announced Castiglione's partner of 13 years, Jerry Trupiano, was not going to be back next season.

"We were coming no matter what," he said. "But I looked at Debbie and said I'd be an idiot if I didn't call the Red Sox and find out if they had any interest in me at least doing some of the games."

Five days later, he was meeting with Red Sox ownership about the job, which allowed him to work Sox games around his ESPN schedule.

Most days, O'Brien is living the dream. But for a portion of 2007 — when ESPN broadcast every game leading up to San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds' 756th career home run — it was difficult, to say the least. Perhaps the greatest record in all of sports was about to be broken by someone accused of cheating his way to get there.

As a play-by-play man, O'Brien said, it is paramount to set the scene and be able to put the moment into context with word choice, tone and voice inflection. On Aug. 7, 2007, the day Bonds broke the record, O'Brien found putting such a controversial and historic moment into context very challenging.

"I've done World Series and no-hitters where I've come out of my seat, I've done the Red Sox 2004 World Series and as a New England boy, a Sox fan, I couldn't help myself ... after the final out, I was in tears. They've all been magical moments.

"This, to me, was something different. When that home run was hit, I just wanted to step out of the way and let the crowd fill in that gap. It was a San Francisco crowd; they're going to have to be judged by what they did as a city and a fan base. Bonds is going to have to be judged with a whole separate set of criteria. And what that record means to other people — they're going to have to make up their own minds."

O'Brien's life is pretty hectic. On Tuesday, he was in Boston; today, he'll fly to Chicago for an ESPN game, then he'll be in Boston through the Red Sox weekend homestand before heading out to Detroit on Sunday on a road trip. It's a lot of planes and a lot of time away from his family, but he's living the dream — two of them, in fact.

"I'm an awfully lucky guy. I'm doing exactly what I wanted to do from the first time I thought about what a career was," he said. "Not many people get to say that."

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